Member

The big thing the N64 struggled with (compared with the PS1) is the number of polygons, I believe. I don't think I ever read about the N64 having trouble with particles, especially from game experience.

TLG Fan Caretaker Est. 2009

Couldn't it crank out way more polygons per frame? It was just that it had such a weird...memory architecture? that it had to texture those polygons using hideous blurred crap and then somethingsomething fog

Member

It's not that black and white but the N64 had Anti-aliasing and a Z-buffer(!) unlike the PS1 (the PlayStation had 'fake' 3D, due to lack of perspective correction you get warped textures when close to screen).

CD storage was the real tech winner really. The PS1 was also straight forward to develop for.

Member

Couldn't it crank out way more polygons per frame? It was just that it had such a weird...memory architecture? that it had to texture those polygons using hideous blurred crap and then somethingsomething fog

Junior Member

The big thing the N64 struggled with (compared with the PS1) is the number of polygons, I believe. I don't think I ever read about the N64 having trouble with particles, especially from game experience.

Member

It definitely was back in the day, especially when everything back then looked like a beefed-up SuperFX game; compared to that, the N64's texture filtering, Z-buffering, and anti-aliasing made what you see on the screen look like a blurry boxy version of reality, as opposed to barely nothing resembling it.

Member

Remember, you still had the best console ports of Duke Nukem Forever and Quake, with real-time coloured moving light sources and an unshakable framerate that Nintendo and Sony owners could only ever dream of. You also had multicoloured transparencies in Sonic R that Mario Kart 64 was never able to match.

No bullshit, the Saturn was a weak 3D machine compared to the Playstation and N64, but Traveller's Tales and Lobotomy Software pulled off some goddamn miracles with Sonic R, Duke Nukem and Quake

Member

I know, I'm just reliving my youth. It had pretty colours, for Saturn 3D it was impressive. I remember reading that its transparency effects in the final chaos emerald course hadn't been matched by the other two consoles at the time.

The Quake and Duke comments I stand by, those ports were legendary work. The Dev studio decided to rebuild both games in their Saturn-optimised Powerslave engine, and they were a joy to play.

The N64 did not have an early death by any stretch of the imagination.

Thanks to the large disc space of PS1 games allowing to store larger textures and full motion video, you could have more "detailed" graphics on the PS1; but something about the N64 doing everything in real time seemed more impressive to me.

Member

I think N64 had a seriously low-res texture limit. Something around 64x64 and 128 at very rare cases. That really bogged down the graphics and at a time when pre-rendered backgrounds were still big, this made them look really bad at times.

card-carrying scientician

Remember, you still had the best console ports of Duke Nukem Forever and Quake, with real-time coloured moving light sources and an unshakable framerate that Nintendo and Sony owners could only ever dream of. You also had multicoloured transparencies in Sonic R that Mario Kart 64 was never able to match.

No bullshit, the Saturn was a weak 3D machine compared to the Playstation and N64, but Traveller's Tales and Lobotomy Software pulled off some goddamn miracles with Sonic R, Duke Nukem and Quake

And yet I revisit the top few games in my N64 library more often than my entire PS1 collection combined. No denying the N64 had some awful droughts, but at the end of the day I'd still give its library the nod based on the insane longevity of its flagship titles.

Well, to be fair, a lot of it has to do with nostalgia. What you grew up with you ended up preferring.

Looking back, the graphics of Gran Turismo are not that appealing, and the (at the time) disappointing visuals for Mario Kart 64 hold up very well, ironically because of the sprites (the very reason many thought it had cheap graphics at the time).

Well I never said one was better than the other, rather there were games on the PSone that held up, and many of those games were helped by FMVs and prerendered backgrounds. You sound a bit insecure, don't worry I am not dogging the N64.

Banned

And yet I revisit the top few games in my N64 library more often than my entire PS1 collection combined. No denying the N64 had some awful droughts, but at the end of the day I'd still give its library the nod based on the insane longevity of its flagship titles.

Member

Well, to be fair, a lot of it has to do with nostalgia. What you grew up with you ended up preferring.

Looking back, the graphics of Gran Turismo are not that appealing, and the (at the time) disappointing visuals for Mario Kart 64 hold up very well, ironically because of the sprites (the very reason many thought it had cheap graphics at the time).